


Pardise

by Garnigal



Category: Firefly, Serenity (2005)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-31
Updated: 2010-03-31
Packaged: 2017-10-08 13:33:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/76155
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Garnigal/pseuds/Garnigal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A clean, white place.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pardise

It was so clean and white here. Nothing like home… nothing like the place I'd grown up. Mother had tried. Probably she'd tried. She'd always been busy at the stove, always mixing up a big stew or porridge to keep the family, the extended family and the occasional wandering tramp well fed. And wasn't that a pleasant thing to come home to after a long day at school – a smelly hobo grinning idiotically and shovelling mush into his toothless mouth.

And Father had been no help, really. Mother and the children had adored him, his booming voice and ready laugh and constant playfulness. He'd been a good provider, I suppose. There was always plenty to eat, and I couldn't fault his concern for my education. I'd gotten the best schooling I could on our tiny moon, and Father had been the one who found the scholarship that got me off to university on Ariel. But he'd never managed to control himself, and Mother was always in the family way, with the babies stair stepping down year after year. They'd might have been well-off and well-respected, had Mother not been so trapped by the babies, had all the money not gone to feeding the small army Mother and Father had single-handedly brought into the world.

They'd cried real tears when I left, all of them waving frantically, Mother, Father and all my sibs. They'd told me I would do wonderfully, not to worry if I felt homesick. They'd told me it would be a short four years and then I'd be back home with them, as if that was supposed to cheer me up. As if that was what I dreamed of.

I said nothing, just smiled and waved back, knowing this would never be my home again. This might be their paradise, but I had nothing in common with those fools.

My years on Ariel had been an education all senses of the word. I'd learned so much at the school, but so much more from my new classmates. Classmates who'd seen my intelligence, my quality, my ambition and nurtured it. Polished me to a shine and delivered me to the world. Delivered me to this clean, bright place.

I'd been recruited for this job right out of school. I'd been awed when the letter came, boasted to all my friends, and waved my parents with the good news. They'd been… disappointed. They'd truly believed I'd come home, waste my central planet polish on that backwoods moon, waste my days working for the same company my father worked for, waste my nights impregnating whatever uneducated girl they chose for my wife.

Instead, I came here. I was doing important work, work for the government. I was working with some of the finest minds in the central planets, in the entire Universe. I was working with the most advanced equipment I'd ever heard of and even some that I'd never seen before. I was being paid more in a single year than my father saw in a decade.

And I never had to return to the dustbowl town I grew up in. Now this… this was truly paradise.


End file.
